► Living with a BMW M3 Touring
► Is the design really that bad?
► Read month 4 here
The current G80/81-generation M3’s design has been the big talking point since its introduction, not to mention a recurrent feature of conversations when I’m out and about with this Touring.
A recent exchange with a race driver basically ran like this. Him: ‘Yours?’ Me: ‘No.’ Him: ‘Minger.’ A photographer friend noted that while the rear three-quarter is perfection, the entire front end is grafted from the M4 coupe, differentiating this new M3 more comprehensively from lesser 3-series. The problem, he reckoned, was that it gives the M3 saloon and estate profile a bulbous, clown-shoe sort of look.
I definitely see that. It is a challenging front, dominated by huge kidney grilles and thin swept-back headlights like those cartoonish representations of wind in kids’ books.
Darker colours are easier on the eye, taking the edge off all those vents, and so are US cars without front number plates. The design is softening for me, but here’s no question that the previous generation is both better looking and inferior to drive (I’ll explore that more fully in a coming issue).
I’ve been pondering some interesting context provided by my own Porsche 996, which arrived in the mid 1990s just after another M3, the E36. Both were designed by Pinky Lai.
Where I instantly ‘got’ the E36 as a relatively gentle evolution of BMW design (and ultimately bought two), I initially went with the consensus that the 996 was a blob with fried-egg headlights.
Today the E36 remains perfection, but the 996 has started to look sleek and gorgeously pure in a way it just didn’t back then, almost like they recalled the design when we weren’t looking. People are even celebrating the headlights.
This retrospective appreciation of the 996 – not to mention BMW’s previously divisive Bangle era – made me wonder if people would ultimately start to embrace the G80 M3’s design and spin the negative into a positive.
Read month 1
Read month 2
Read month 3
Read month 4
Logbook: BMW M3 Touring
Price £86,570 (£107,080 as tested)
Performance 2993cc turbocharged six-cylinder, 503bhp, 3.6sec 0-62mph, 180mph
Efficiency 27.2-28.0mpg (official), 23.9mpg (tested), 229-235g/km C02
Energy cost 27.2p per mile
Miles this month 1350
Total miles 12,137